Lost (14 page)

I had my best leather bag securely slung over my shoulder and around my neck, right hand on the strap. I didn’t see the gang of boys coming, but they saw me, and the biggest of them snaked his arm through the strap—he never stopped moving—and the next thing I was being carried down Fifth Avenue by five or six boys. White boys with low-rider attitudes, laughing and cackling and being so outrageously boisterous that my muffled shouts went nowhere. It must have looked like I was part of the gang, if you didn’t happen to notice that my feet weren’t connected to the sidewalk.

They carried me for most of one block, worked the strap free of my neck, yanked my hair so hard it felt like they’d torn my scalp, and then dumped me on the sidewalk, scraped and bleeding from both knees. Bag gone, money gone, day ruined. All in broad daylight, with hundreds of pedestrians within arm’s reach, every last one of them looking away, studiously avoiding the noxious teen spirit.

Without the fare to get home, and barely enough for a phone call, Mom had to pack up Kelly, come into the city and rescue me. Found me angry and red eyed in Penn Station,
cursing Manhattan. Could happen anywhere, she said, comforting me. Don’t blame it on the city and don’t let it get you down. That was her other mantra.
Don’t let it get you down, baby doll.
A constant refrain to herself as well as me, and it got us through a lot. My father leaving, me dropping out of school to have a baby, me getting my GED, me eventually graduating from the Long Island Fashion Institute, me getting my first real job.

A whole lot of me, and not much Mom. That was her gift, of course, the road she willingly took from the moment I finally confessed to the pregnancy I’d been hiding and denying for months.

Secrets.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. The man with the shiny black gun. My second mugging. Guy with a gun, he must want my handbag, right?

“You and your boyfriend, stop right there,” he demands, in a voice that seems a little too high and scratchy for his bulk. “Keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

His oddly protuberant eyes are darting between me and Shane, like he’s playing eenie-meenie in his head. Is it a thyroid condition does that to the eyeballs? Or high blood pressure? Anyhow, he has eyes like boiled eggs and his close-shaved skull looks like a chunk of hard, lumpy wax glistening under the overhead lights. A drop of sweat congeals at the tip of his flattened nose. An ugly-looking customer for sure, but what bothers me even more than the gun—is it real or a toy, how would I know the difference?—what really bothers me is this: the man is very, very nervous.

“Listen real careful,” says the egg man, pausing to wipe the sweat from his nose with his free hand. “Stay away from Edwin Manning. Stay away from his home, his family, his
business, his airplanes, everything to do with him. Stay away, you’ll be okay. Don’t stay away, bad things’ll happen. Capiche?”

“Understood,” says Shane, sounding utterly reasonable. “You happen to know where the King Air was headed?”

The man’s forehead furrows. Beads of sweat seep from his forehead, making his egg-shaped eyes blink even more rapidly. “The
what?
I told you—shut up!”

“The Beechcraft that’s supposed to be in this hangar. Where’d it go? We’re assuming Seth was at the controls. He never bothered to file a fight plan, why was that?”

The man with the gun looks confused, unsure of how to respond, and he looks at me with a beleaguered expression, as if he wants me to intervene, stop all these complicated questions.

In that moment, as his buggy eyes shift, Shane glides in front of me, blocking my view.

Next thing I know, the egg man is lying sideways on the concrete, groaning and holding his shoulder, and Shane has the gun. Which on second glance—or tenth—isn’t all that shiny. Just black and deadly.

With an air of icy calm Shane says, “Lock the door, please, Mrs. Garner. There should be a thumb latch on the knob.”

I hurry to the door. Set the lock before it hits me—shouldn’t we be running away? But it soon becomes apparent that Randall Shane has other plans.

“Wallet?” he says to the burly, big-gutted man on the floor.

A nasty scratch on the side of the man’s shaved head oozes a little blood, just above the ear. “Fuck you, Jack!” he says in his high, scratchy voice. “Why’d ya do that, huh?”

Shane says, “Very prudent, leaving the safety on. Which means whoever sent you issued specific instructions. In the future, you want to menace someone with a Sig Sauer, and
do it safely, don’t try ‘cocked and locked.’ Empty the chamber. The safety slide is a tip-off.”

“Yeah, thanks.” The man grimaces, baring his teeth. “You broke something, you fuck.”

“Your right collarbone,” Shane informs him. “It’ll heal eventually. Now kindly produce identification or I’ll break your left collarbone. That means an upper-chest cast. Very awkward and you’ll be laid up for six weeks.”

The man angrily slips a fist into his baggy tracksuit, flings a wallet at Shane, who lets it drop to the concrete in front of him.

“Please pick that up,” he asks me, very polite, never wavering with the gun. “Let’s see if this nice gentleman has a name.”

The billfold is a quality piece, Italian made. Dyed ostrich skin, hand stitched. Inside, a New Jersey driver’s license identifies our would-be assailant as Salvatore J. Popkin, residing on McKinley Avenue in Atlantic City.

“Says he’s six foot, two hundred pounds,” I note.

Shane chuckles. “More like five-nine, two-fifty,” he says. “Didn’t your mother teach you to always tell the truth, Sal?”

I keep rummaging through the billfold, hold out another identification card for inspection.

“Interesting,” Shane says. “Sal is a security crew supervisor at Wunderbar Casino. That’s the one they call Wonderbra, right Sal? On account of the chip girls?”

“I ain’t talkin’ to you,” Sal responds sullenly.

“Sure you are,” Shane cajoles. “You were sent here to talk to us, right? Try to scare us? Why else have the gun on safety? You want us to leave Mr. Manning and his various toys alone. Anything else?”

Sal thinks about it. While he’s mulling it over his fingers probe the scratch above his ear and he inspects the seeping blood. His expression becomes even more malevolent. If his
swollen, oddly protuberant eyes were laser beams we’d both be burned to a crisp. But they’re not, and he’s on the floor with a broken collarbone, and something tells me Randall Shane doesn’t need a weapon to reduce Salvatore Popkin to a whimpering puddle, and Sal knows it and hates him for it.

“Just keep the fuck away,” he says grudgingly. “That’s it.”

“Or else? Threats of physical harm and so on?”

“Yeah, big-time.”

Shane considers this. “So Edwin Manning tells you keep an eye on his empty hangar? Or is it more like, if certain people come sniffing around, looking for Seth, run them off?”

Sal looks away, purses his sweaty lips. Clearly wishing himself elsewhere, on a planet that didn’t include big rangy guys who can take away his gun, break his bones. “Got it all figured out, huh? If you’re so smart, why’d the FBI get rid of you?”

This elicits a dangerous-looking smile from Shane. “I left in good standing,” he says softly. “Not that it’s any of your concern. But thank you for confirming that your boss read my business card.”

“Concrete is killing me,” the fat man protests. “I’m gonna get up.”

“Not quite yet,” Shane tells him, emphasizing with the gun. “Couple of ways to play this. I can notify the authorities—and that will include the Feds—and we can press charges. Assault with a firearm, threat of deadly force. Serious felony charge, especially if you don’t happened to be licensed to carry this particular weapon. Or, and I’m hoping Mrs. Garner will indulge me in this, we can go a different route. You with me so far?”

Another grudging nod from the floor.

“How about this?” Shane suggests. “You report back to Mr. Manning, tell him the threat worked. You waved a gun around and talked tough and we’re frightened out of our
minds. We begged for mercy. We promised to keep out of Manning’s personal business and we’re way too scared to go to the cops. Does that work for you, Sal? Can you sell that?”

The man stares up at him. “You serious?”

“It’s the smart move.”

“What about my piece?” he says, pointing with his chin.

“The Sig? You get it back.”

“And this?” he asks, indicating his crippled shoulder.

Shane grins. “You smacked me so hard it fractured a bone. You don’t know your own strength. Bruise your knuckles on something, make it convincing.”

Sal has a strange look on his face. Takes a moment for me to decipher it as a smile. “I could bruise it on your face,” he suggests. “Make it real.”

“Trust me,” Shane says. “You don’t want to do that. Now take off your shoes and socks.”

27. Call For Edwin Manning

Funny how life changes in a blink. One day your five-year-old is happy and healthy, the next she’s got cancer. The day after that she’s flying off with a boyfriend you never heard of, and two minutes later you’re holding a Nike sneaker with a pistol shoved into a white cotton sock.

Or that’s how it seems, everything rushing by so fast I can’t get a grip, can’t make sense of what’s happening. And oh, I really do have the gun in the sneaker, sock and all.

“Here it is,” Shane says, indicating a new Chevy sedan in the rental car row.

I place the loaded Nike beside the rear left tire, as promised. Shane’s rather clever means of hobbling our assailant, who will be limping along behind us, trying to keep his fat
and tender feet from burning on the hot tarmac. One assumes he will retrieve his shoes and his socks and his weapon, although not the actual bullets, which Shane has thoughtfully removed. By then—I picture bad-boy Sal jumping up and down with rage, his belly jiggling furiously—we’ll be long gone, melting into traffic. Or that’s the plan.

“Hope you know what’s going on, because I sure don’t,” I protest, scooting gingerly into the hot leather seats of the big Lincoln. “What if that creep helped kidnap Kelly? Shouldn’t we have him arrested? Or torture him or something?”

That elicits a full-throated chuckle from the man in the driver’s seat. “Torture? You wouldn’t object?”

“If he knows where Kelly is, I’ll torture him myself!”

Shane eyes me in the rearview as he fires up the engine, adjusts the AC. “I’ll take care to remain on your good side,” he says thoughtfully. “Let’s get rolling, then I’ll explain.”

The expressway is clotted but steady—my ever-cautious driver has no trouble staying well under the speed limit, unfortunately. Must admit I do keep checking out the back window, fighting this weird idea that our bent-nosed assailant will come running down the median in his bare feet, waving his gun, seeking revenge for his humiliation.

Once we’re well clear of the airport, Shane says, “Okay. Remember I mentioned that Edwin Manning made his fortune with a hedge fund? It’s called the Merrill Manning Capital Fund. Merrill was his wife’s maiden name, and that’s where the money originally came from.”

“So he’s loaded. We already knew that.”

“There’s rich and there’s superrich,” Shane points out. “Manning Capital is a private hedge fund, as private as the law allows. It has five billion dollars in assets. Management
fees on a fund like that would be something like thirty million a year, plus twenty-five percent of the profit. So Edwin Manning is probably pulling down two or three hundred million a year, maybe more.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow.”

“And what, he gambled it all away? That’s why he knows that creep from Atlantic City?”

“Not exactly. The fund he runs—the fund he owns, for all practical purposes—is the single largest private investor in the gaming industry. That’s their specialty. Online gambling, casinos, real estate associated with casinos. If someone is wagering money, chances are Manning Capital has a piece of the profit.”

I’m stunned. It’s hard to imagine the frightened little man, cowering all alone in his empty house, as some sort of gambling mogul. “You mean Manning’s a gangster?” I ask. “Like the godfather or Tony Soprano?”

“Not a gangster,” Shane says, shaking his head. “An investor.”

“What’s the difference?”

Shane laughs. “One goes to prison, the other doesn’t.”

My friend Fern likes the slots. Not me. I hate the idea of putting money in a machine that doesn’t stitch things together, so I never participated. Truth is, I’ve never actually been in a casino, not in New Jersey, not in Connecticut, not anywhere. I don’t buy lottery tickets. With me it’s not a religious or moral objection, it’s about years of being careful with every penny, apportioning this much for groceries, that much for a car payment, medical insurance, so many dollars
for school expenses. Plus, you win a game of cancer, roll the bones with death, everything else pales.

Heading back to Valley Stream, Shane does his best to bring me up to speed. All the things he was doing while I slept, and after Monica Bevins came by. How Kelly’s prints may be present in Seth’s Porsche, and that’s why it was important to have the vehicle impounded—it will help build a case for intervention. How, exactly, the FBI runs a so-called shadow investigation. No agents will approach Edwin Manning directly, but in all other ways the full investigative weight of the agency will come to bear, with a special emphasis on the financials. Financials being the money that flows to and from Mr. Manning.

According to Shane, the financials are the key.

“He withdraws a large amount of cash, we’ll know it before the teller stops counting. If he wires money to, say, an offshore bank, we’ll know that, too.”

“You think this has something to do with gambling? That’s why his son was kidnapped? Or is it just because Manning is rich?”

“Dunno,” says Shane. “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe we’re completely off base about a kidnapping and Seth and your daughter hijacked daddy’s private plane and are out there sightseeing.”

“You believe that?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Shane admits. “Edwin Manning isn’t worried about his boy borrowing the company plane. Somebody scared the hell out of him.”